Special Notice (SN) DARPA-SN-23-80

Collaborative Knowledge Curation (CKC) Webinar

July 27, 2023

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Defense Sciences Office (DSO) is sponsoring a live webinar to provide information and promote technical exchange with potential proposers on the objectives about the Collaborative Knowledge Curation (CKC) Advanced Research Concepts (ARC) Opportunity (DARPA-EA‐23-01-03). The webinar will include information specific to the CKC ARC Opportunity as well as an overview of DSO and the ARC initiative. Registrants will hear from experts in knowledge curation and economic statecraft and have the opportunity to ask questions. The webinar will be held on Thursday, July 27, 2023. Registration is required for all attendees of the webinar.

To maximize the pool of innovative research concepts, DARPA strongly encourages participation in these events and subsequent solicitations by non‐traditional performers, including small businesses, academic and research institutions, and first‐time Government contractors.
 

CKC OPPORTUNITY DESCRIPTION

Overview: DARPA/DSO has issued an ARC Opportunity inviting submissions of abstracts for innovative exploratory research concepts in the technical domain of quantum computing applications (https://www.darpa.mil/ARC). ARC Opportunities are designed to allow an individual researcher the opportunity and time to focus on nascent, paradigm-shifting ideas for national security applications. This CKC Opportunity is issued under the umbrella ARC Exploration Announcement (EA), DARPA-EA-23-01.

Background: In a world of increasingly complicated and interdependent systems, analysts and decision-makers spend more and more time curating the knowledge that informs their models and decisions. Knowledge curation involves acquiring information from many sources; triaging it as unimportant, contextual, or actionable; identifying factors and causal links; finding associated datasets; and developing metrics to measure objectives. This process is integral to successful economic statecraft, where knowledge curation is used to convert natural language objectives, such as “building soft power,” into measurable, causal hypotheses, such as “Increasing D will increase X, as measured by I.” Despite being a vital step in the decision-making process, knowledge curation is usually done by hand, which means analysts and decision-makers often miss important factors in complicated socioeconomic systems. For example, restrictions on the purchase of Russian oil did not include bans on the sale of ships to Russia, allowing the growth of a “shadow fleet” ferrying oil in defiance of price caps. The CKC ARC Opportunity will explore how machines can help analysts and decision-makers curate information faster and more thoroughly.

Solicitation Question: The CKC ARC Opportunity is soliciting ideas to explore the following question: How can we partially automate knowledge curation to help analysts and decision-makers gain and maintain awareness in complicated, interdependent systems?

Scope: The CKC ARC Opportunity solicits methodologies and technologies that treat humans and machines as partners in the partial automation of knowledge curation. This ARC Opportunity seeks reusable knowledge curation methodologies and technologies; building scenario-specific models at the expense of a generalizable approach is not within scope. Extracting causal factors by applying machine learning to quantitative data is not sufficient without significant human-machine collaboration. Expert-driven approaches such as knowledge engineering are of particular interest.
 

REGISTRATION INFORMATION

The webinar will be held virtually on Thursday, July 27, 2023 from 10:30 AM to 4:00 PM EDT with virtual check‐in beginning at 10:00 a.m. EDT.

Participants must register to attend the webinar through the registration website (this site): https://events.sa-meetings.com/CKCWebinar. There is no fee for the webinar.

Registration Opens: As of publication of this announcement.

Registration Closes: Wednesday, July 26, 2023 at 12:00 PM EDT, or when capacity is reached, whichever comes first.

Individuals within the same organization interested in attending the webinar are encouraged to coordinate attendance internally within their organization prior to registration since DARPA will limit participation to three (3) people per organization.

If interested individuals cannot register because registration is closed or capacity has been reached, instructions for being added to the waitlist are provided on the website. If slots remain open after registration closes or become available due to cancellations, the slots will be filled on a first come, first served basis from the waitlist. Individuals requesting to attend in excess of the capacity limitation will also be added to the waitlist.

All briefing materials shared at the webinar will be posted to the DARPA Work With Us / Opportunities page:  https://www.darpa.mil/work-with-us/opportunities. 
 

ELIGIBILITY

Attendance is open to individuals who are U.S. citizens, U.S. permanent residents, and foreign nationals. All registrants who are not U.S. citizens must complete and submit either a DARPA Form 60 (U.S. Permanent Resident and Foreign National Visit Request – e.g., industry or academia) or an Official Visit Request (foreign government personnel, only) through the U.S. Embassy based in Washington, DC, no later than 5:00 PM EDT on July 24, 2023. Form 60 submission instructions are provided on the registration website and in the registration confirmation email. Contact your Embassy staff for assistance in submitting the Official Visit Request.
 

DISCLAIMERS

Attendance at the CKC webinar is voluntary and is not required to propose to DARPA-EA-23-01-03. The webinar does not constitute a formal solicitation for proposals or abstracts. This announcement is issued solely for information and program planning purposes and is not a Request for Information (RFI). Since this is not an RFI, the Government will not accept submissions against this notice. DARPA will not provide reimbursement for costs incurred to participate in this webinar.
 

CONTACT INFORMATION

Registration Website:  https://events.sa-meetings.com/CKCWebinar (this site)

POC: CKC Administrative Team at CKC@darpa.mil

Administrative questions should be submitted to CKC@darpa.mil. Please include “CKC Webinar” in the subject line in all correspondence. Inquiries that do not include this subject line may not receive a response.